Elon Musk’s Boring Company Releases Concept Video
14 responses to “Elon Musk’s Boring Company Releases Concept Video”
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It should maybe be more separated from the traffic, or a car will drive down that hole in the road. And will the tunnels be earthquake safe or become a giant death trap when that inevitable day comes to LA? But infrastructure investments seem to have a bright future now. He’s following political trends to get bonus tax money funding.
This seems somewhat along the lines of what Boston did. Does anyone who lived in the before and after the Big Dig have any insights on how well this approach works? From my own experience, it’s a real boon to a city when you can prevent automobiles from whole city blocks. The foot traffic goes thru the roof, and it’s so much more pleasant to spend time downtown. I really liked the effect these efforts had in Manhattan, getting cars off the road really makes a city. Replacing them with sub-way roads might be a good long term solution. I donno about this car shuttle thing, in a place like NYC they’d charge you $10 per city block. But I admit letting humans do the driving in a complex ant hill would be a real problem. If you do it wrong, it could come to this.
That’s a lot of boring. Dude thinks big, gotta give him that(!), but I’m not seeing it on this one, at least not on the scale shown. Then again, if I saw all the subway lines under the city where I live, I might change my mind — that’s gotta be a lot of tunneling there. Plus more for water lines and such — maybe it’s not so crazy after all. However though, as Andrew mentioned below, what would be the cost per use? It looks, as shown here, more like something for rich guys to zip under the unwashed masses than for the average Joe to use every day. Oh well, at least it’d get a few guys off the road
Anyway, I wonder if that clear vehicle shown at the approx. 45 – 52 second mark is the VW Microbus-ish vehicle he’s said Tesla’s working on for release in the next few years. He said it would be designed for municipalities (and maybe businesses?) more than for individuals. If so, that’s a pretty amazingly Sci Fi-looking vehicle (could get pretty hot in summer though…)
I want the boring tech off world with atomic power plants behind it. You land some large Sea Dragon lunar payloads–with the equipment. It lands in a crater. You house the crater over–and pump in atmosphere. An all Nitrogen atmosphere.
Then electric heavy quarry equipment can work as is. Zero fire danger. Aastronauts walk around in oxygenated suits–hose dust down. The atmosphere carries heat away–and allows lubrication to work. Then you bore into crater walls–clean up the crater. And link to other craters–with atmosphere following you as you bore to cary away heat. Link into blocked lava tubes from the side–not above. No spelunking
interesting.
So, he is competing against his hyperloop, though to be fair, this looks more like a fast way to get across a large city, rather than city-city or points within a city.
Actually probably with an eye towards using whatever is learned with this project FOR Hyperloop.
Hyperloop doesn’t work for short distances, or very long distances. It’s optimised for regional inter-city. That leaves intra-city transport for this lower speed tunnel’n’cart system, and inter-regional transport for his electric supersonic VTOL airliner.
Actually, it’s a clever method to extend the driving range of his Tesla cars. And since it’s all under ground, you don’t want a car exhaust fouling things up either. But, unless people are really tied that closely to their cars, this is a concept that is better implemented with a good old subway. Get those people out of the cars and onto a train. You couldn’t do a project like this unless it was a public works effort anyway. A private company doesn’t get to build a separate tunnel system, along with those elevators for bring the carts up and down from street level.
How much has Cali spent on hi-speed rail so far ? Is Musk proposing to go faster ?? Sure, give him that funding.
Remember this is in the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia. It might have been cheaper in terms of expense, liability, and regulation costs to spin up an entire company to do this tunnelling project than to do it “in-house” by SpaceX or hiring a contractor to do it.
and yet, spaceX and Tesla have lower costs than companies in other states.
Because they are masters at playing the incentives and tax breaks game.
Give me a break. You think some tiny tax breaks from CA and Tx, combined with nasa subsidy on cots makes a difference?
If so, than ula should be a fraction of space because they have had much larger state subsidies, and gets a 1B subsidy EACH year, which is larger than spacex’s ( excluding dragon 2 ).
Elons got to stop stealing my crazy ideas.
Check out @dtarsgeorge’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/dtarsge…
Dam I was pretty close!
🙂
I think it was just a sneaky way of getting a video full of Tesla cars viraled out.